


Broke Time, Outgrew It

by Radiolaria



Series: Meta Essays [7]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived From onaperduamedee Blog, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 21:48:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16921017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: An analysis of Moffat's use of time skips and gaps in narration to expand the story and fictional universe.





	Broke Time, Outgrew It

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on Jan. 7, 2015 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/107356420353/moffatdiscourse-submitted-by) as an answer to a submission made to [tillthenexttimedoctor](http://tillthenexttimedoctor.tumblr.com/).
> 
> (I’m going in with a literary approach to this, so bear with me and my eccentricities. This got really long and became a personal linear interpretation of timing during the Moffat era)

In every work of fiction one accepts there is little overlapping between the fictional time, story-time, and the real time, text-time, experienced during the consumption of the material. The greater the difference between real time and fictional time, the more the accent will be put on _what is told and skipped_ , rather than shown. So it’s all about compression and dilatation of the time and the way it is applied to certain characters. Moffat era could practically be defined by this; the jumps and paces tell so much about everything.

Because of the time travelling basis of the show, the points of view can be anchored to different times and paces. The very first appearance of the Eleventh Doctor is one of excessive continuity. In the tradition of the show, we pick up with Eleven exactly where we left Ten, in his damaged TARDIS, crashing into little Amelia’s garden. The first noticeable ellipsis happens immediately after and to Amelia, not the Doctor; the Doctor doesn’t show up in Amelia’s garden before  **12 years** have passed. 12 years during which Amy grows up, bites four psychiatrists, writes essays about hot Italians, gets herself a fiancé, raises her daughter...

But the show doesn’t stop here. Having saved the world, the Doctor accidentally disappears for **two years** more. From his point of view, merely **minutes** had passed both times. This introduction is important: ellipses are part of Amy’s story. Amy is the girl whose past was eaten by a crack, just like her childhood was eaten by the narrative. For a minute, we almost believed Little Amelia Pond would travel with the Doctor. The show is from her point of view but we got nothing from those 12 years. We were robbed of Little Amelia by a crack.

The rest of the season is steady in its unravelling, without big jumps, with no time-stamps on the adventures, a common practice in the show, and told from Amy’s point of view. That is until the finale that not only places all the trips with the Ponds within **one night** , but also _reboots_ them, along with the first twenty two years or so of Amelia’s life, after inserting **2,000 years** of waiting in the middle. Steven Moffat managed to _pause_ time for an entire season, afterwards, using the flexibility of time in the show to play with gaps and cuts in narration. Moffat stuffs them, turning one night into a processions of dream-like experiences (the tone of series 5 is essential in there), in which everything is possible. Gaps and pauses in dreams are only natural. And we listen to him.

After the Ponds’ honeymoon, the Doctor disappears from their life **for two months**. When he reappears, it’s an older Doctor, by **200 years**. This jump, with the appearance of time travel at first, will be revealed as another ellipsis by the end of the series, from the Doctor’s point of view. Ellipsis on ellipsis. Enters the younger Doctor who obviously has seen the Ponds much recently and the show resumes his steadier pace. A fair amount of adventures and near-death experiences later, Amy is revealed to be about to give birth; less than nine months has passed since Utah beach. **Summer passes** , the team reunites in a corn field and adventures pick up again until the Doctor leaves the Ponds. The gaps were more closely embracing the show’s real gaps; the Christmas Special, the new season, the summer break. The show seems to be slipping into real time as the Ponds settle into real life.

And then Moffat reminds every one of his timey wimey mind and sort of does the contrary of what he did the previous season. Instead of a wake-up episode, we have a dream episode that reintroduces the previous season’s tone and its _pause_ in time, this time literally. Time stops, everything and nothing happen at once. Don’t trust the pace he sets for his audience. Ellipsis-wise, the Doctor travels for **200 years** and returns to earlier Ponds in Utah, and later to present Ponds on Christmas Eve. For the Ponds it has been **two years** since they last saw the Doctor, although River did pop off at some point to reassure them about the Doctor’s life.

 **200 years, two years**. The narration juxtaposes two ways of experiencing times passing: Time Lord and human. The juxtaposition is a mechanical consequence of time travel obviously, but the ellipses remain startling. It’s an interesting reversal of Amy and Eleven’s first meeting - **5 minutes, 14 years**. 14 years was more than half of Amy’s life at the time; 200 years the time it would take Eleven to walk to his death. The Doctor’s life is known for its _summary_ aspect, which is the rapid telling of a series of scenes. Well, rapid for him. He lives very long and we can only catch glimpses of his full, strange life. But what if it is exactly the same for him? What if his companions live very slowly and he can only catch glimpses of their full, strange life?

This is what series 7a seems to embrace. A period of endless ellipses and jumps starts. First by a dated period of absence. _Pond life_ is a fascinating piece for the way it shows the Doctor’s absence, in contrast to the _Eleventh Hour_. The months of building tension in which the Doctor is not there, from April to August, are depicted on-screen, labelled, in the form of a _summary_ , months passing in minutes on-screen. And the aftermath, consequential divorce is enforced in _Asylum of the Daleks_. The chronology and pacing afterwards become more complex…  

At the core, we know _The Power of Three_ reveals that, at that point, the Ponds have been travelling on and off with the Doctor for **10 years**. The adventures depicted on-screen can only account for 2-3 years, which means roughly 7 to 8 years have passed since the Christmas the Doctor spent with them. Judging by some clues left (Rory mentioning leaving his phone at Henri VIII’s), _A Town called Mercy_ might have happened for the Doctor during the events depicted in _The Power of Three_ or even after the last Ponds adventure in Manhattan. _The Power of Three_ itself is a _summary_ , snapshots from a whole year. Unexpected jumps. So the prequel and second to last episode of the Ponds era are summaries. The episodes in between are so undated within the ten years span that the entirety of series 7a could well be just that; a summary. Last snapshots of a life, taken by the Doctor with the prescience or knowledge of his friends’ demise. As familiarity grows, the Ponds also become a mystery to the Doctor, leading a life in which he is not essential. They chose the boring life and, much like River, control their escapes from this life into the Doctor’s life, while he watches them fade.

And since we are mentioning River and leaving behind the Pond era, it might be interesting to talk about the trickiest of the Ponds, whose life is a paper doll chain. We go, backwards, from one step to the other, overlooking and second-guessing, years and years of change and character growth. From infant to child, from child to young adult, from undergraduate to Doctor, Doctor to Professor, etc. What I mentioned before about how skipping and jumping puts an emphasis on the skipped is essential for characters like River; she is defined by her refusal to be told (“I’m always lying”), by her self-told protean ability (Melody Malone/Pond/Mels Zucker/River Song). She is a mystery for the Doctor and the Ponds, so her character has to be imbalanced by this unknown in her life. Previous tool of a syllabus, the adventures she’s having far from them, in the gaps, are essential to her; not even the script-writers can take her place as sole narrator there. That’s why so much is _told_ and _skipped_ about her. River exists in a meta-fictional world of her own. From the start, she was an imprint in a computer, a virtual, timeless world where everything is possible.

Carrying on with sinuous season 7. Season 5 and 6 seemed dreadfully non-linear, but series 7 is a mess. A good mess. And there’s a reason to this: Clara, the woman who broke time as we know it in the show.

Contrary to the Ponds’ adventures in series 5 and 6, Clara’s travels with the Doctor are very much time-stamped and _regular_ : once a week on Wednesdays. And the Doctor complies, despite having proven in his very first episode how unable he is to land on time. The Doctor travels back to Clara’s childhood on several occasions but it is this time purely time travel, not even making up for a previous ellipsis but for an inconsistency: he saw Clara die twice. The regularity is essential for a character like Clara; she’s imaginative but very much standing on her two feet. She’s perfect for him, an embodiment of companions and history even –she’s the companion of the 50th after all. Back to an adventure of the week format, no huge skipping, no remarkable gaps. That is until she breaks time a first time, by jumping into the Doctor’s timestream. When Clara breaks time, incident which arguably caused the TARDIS to hold a grudge against her, she does not break _any_ time –like River-, she breaks _the Doctor’s time_ , everywhen, everywhere. Just like the previous reversals in pacing structure, this is not innocent.

When we meet Clara after the incident, we expect the aftermath to be shown; we were shown previously with the Doctor dying and leaving the Ponds, with Rory and Amy’s divorce, with River’s farewell and the Doctor’s mourning. There is a parallel to be made between _Asylum of the Daleks_ and _The Snowmen_ , both dealing with the aftermath of a loss, both involving an incarnation of Clara and in fact insuring the continuity between two vastly different halves of a season. If the build-up to the Ponds divorce had been time-stamped in _Pond life_ , one cannot deny River’s death had not been as well, on four years or so. Different lifespans, different paces. This is a Pond thing, apparently.

But _Clara is not a Pond_ and the narration wants to be sure we feel it. With a glaring ellipsis. In _The Day of the Doctor,_ Clara is now a teacher and no previous mention has been made of her recovery from the timestream, or studying, or plans. She has obviously been travelling with the Doctor in the meantime, enough for to work off his obsession their trip to Doctor’s grave on Trenzalore had revealed to her, enough for her to be at last chummy with the TARDIS. But we didn’t get the aftermath, we didn’t even get the middle ground; we got directly to the next chapter. The only mention to Clara’s time in the timestream is “You've met them before, don't you remember?” to which she simply answers “A bit”.

The ellipsis is here more flagrant than anything we’ve seen before with the Ponds. The Ponds ride had set a certain pace, working with ellipses and gaps and rewrites, to the point where a character like River Song was perfectly _natural_. We were used to it. With Clara, it is more jarring, more huge. The consequence is, as we said before, to emphasise what was not shown: the dealing with consequences. There’s a reason to that. Firstly because the first thing Clara does in the episode is break the Doctor’s time, yet again, defuse and edit the Time War; the undoing of the most consequential event the new show had introduced. Secondly because Clara’s arc for the next series will be precisely that: not dealing with problems and skipping past. And Moffat just hung a narrative Chekhov’s gun before his audience. And warning them that Clara edits her story, a lot. This is not the Pond era anymore.

Sleep and dream soundly and you will find yourself on top of a rollercoaster, waiting to dive.

Clara and the Doctor meet again at Christmas. No indication is given as to how much time passed. Trenzalore is **one evening** for Clara, **300 years** and couples more for the Doctor.  Another reversal is in sight. Contrary to the elusive **200 years** pre-Utah, the Doctor’s life on Trenzalore is shown as a _summary_ , narrated by Tasha Lem. The Doctor’s misadventures were _shown_ to the Ponds via History in _The Impossible Astronaut_ , somewhat documented by River after they parted with the Doctor, but Clara is completely cut from the Doctor. Three spaces evolve in parallel at different speed: Trenzalore with the Doctor and Tasha; Earth with Clara and her family; the TARDIS cooking the turkey. But Tasha doesn’t age, while the Doctor does; the turkey becomes an object of betrayal; and travelling from Earth to Trenzalore takes **three hundred years** for the Doctor, **frozen seconds** for Clara gripped to the TARDIS’ door. Here is the jarring again.

The ellipsis is truly one of _rupture_ for Clara; there are some things they should have lived together, and his dying alone certainly was not part of the plan. But Clara edits a lot and she knows from experience she can change time. So Clara breaks the Doctor’s time again, keeping the Doctor from dying, and in doing so seems to rewrite the entirety of series seven. Which would be the topic of another discussion.

With a new face, their adventures resume on a _regular_ basis –he’s her hobby-, this time with the evolution of Clara’s relationship with such characters as Danny or Courtney as time-stamps. Her life becomes the scale to which time passing is measured and Clara needs control. In the middle of the season, _The Caretaker_ , similar to _The Power of Three,_ introduces back the _summary_ with Clara and Danny’s dates, with an emphasis on how this so-called regular rhythm is indeed eating away Clara. The season is also paced with solutions of continuity _brought by Clara_ , as she parts with the Doctor on two different occasions ( _Kill the Moon, Death in Heaven_ ).

These ruptures of Clara’s doing, combined with the regularity she imposes on her trips with the Doctor and time passing with time-stamps that she fashioned, do even more for the depiction of Clara as a Time Lord than her actions. **Clara controls time** –or tries to, but from what we see the Doctor isn’t really good at it- and is a good Time Lord. She keeps editing and writing, just like she lies. And writing is very much linked to Amy in the show, Amy and dreams…

So naturally, the events of _Last Christmas_ take place on one night, much like the entirety of series 5, but in a _world of dream_ which considerably disturbs the juxtaposition of the two timelines, the Doctor’s incarnation; all in all, at this moment, _Clara and the Doctor are in perfect synchronisation for one night_. Dreaming together and so deep in their subconscious, they experience time the same way, baring their respective lies and fantasies. In harmony as their disagreement is unveiled. 

In another dream episode, the Doctor had been provided with an echo, the Dream Lord, and he was supposed to be more or less the Doctor. Well, maybe this time around, his echo had a different appearance and character… Clara is not done being the Doctor.


End file.
